Radiotelevision del Principado de Asturias (RTPA)

Radiotelevisión del Principado de Asturias (RTPA) is the public broadcaster of the Principality of Asturias. Law 8/2014 of 17 July merged three regional public companies into a single limited company whose capital belongs entirely to the Principality. Azahara Cañedo Ramos has been Director General since July 2026. The Junta General del Principado elected her on 10 June, and the RTPA Board completed her appointment as President and Director on 6 July, ending more than six years of acting management.

Media assets

Television: TPA7, which began regular broadcasting on 9 June 2006, and TPA8, launched on 2 May 2010. TPA9 HD, the transitional channel used during the high-definition migration, closed when TPA7 and TPA8 moved to high definition in February 2024.

Radio: RPA, on air since 8 September 2006, which carries hourly bulletins in Spanish and Asturian.

Digital: rtpa.es and the TPA a la carta on-demand service. RTPA records a 24-hour YouTube stream of the TPA international signal and RPA from 13 July 2026 and its first FAST channel over HbbTV on 10 August 2026.

Ownership and governance

RTPA is a single-shareholder public limited company created by the merger of Radio del Principado de Asturias, Productora de Programas del Principado de Asturias and Televisión del Principado de Asturias, the absorbing company. The Principality holds all its capital.

The Board of Directors has nine members including the Director General. Article 14 of Law 8/2014 requires the other eight to be elected by the Junta General by a two-thirds majority on the proposal of parliamentary groups, after a parliamentary appearance. If that majority is not reached, the Junta General elects by absolute majority 24 hours after the first vote. Article 15 sets six-year terms, renewable once, staggered so that they do not coincide with the legislature.

RTPA publishes the eight non-executive members as Carmen Veiga Porto, Adolfo Camilo Díaz López, Norma Bernad Romeo, Jorge Hurlé Palacio, Eva San Román Noriega, Almudena Iglesias Celorio, Alfonso Suárez Suárez and Vicente González Bernaldo de Quirós. Parliamentary groups propose them; a January 2025 Board vote identifies Díaz López as a Socialist Party proposal and San Román Noriega and Hurlé Palacio as Popular Party proposals.

Under Article 20, the Junta General elects the Director General by a two-thirds majority in the first round and, failing that, by absolute majority in a new round 24 hours later. The shareholder then names the appointee a director and the Board president.

That fallback route decided the 2026 appointment. Francisco González Orejas, appointed acting Director General by the Board in March 2019 and elected president of the Federation of Autonomous Radio and Television Organizations in January 2024, resigned in January 2026 to retire. The Socialist Party’s preferred candidate, the journalist Daniel Forcada, drew objections from its coalition partner IU-Convocatoria por Asturies and from cultural organisations including the Academia de la Llingua Asturiana, was never formally registered, and the deadline for candidacies was extended to 21 May. Cañedo, a journalism lecturer at the Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha with a doctorate in media research, was proposed by the Socialist group and appeared before the Junta General’s RTPA control committee. The first round on 9 June did not reach the 30 votes required of the chamber’s 45 seats. On 10 June she was elected by absolute majority with 23 votes in favour, 18 blank and three void, supported by the Socialist Party, IU-Convocatoria por Asturies and the unaffiliated deputy Covadonga Tomé. The parliamentary election is not the final step. Under Article 20.2 the sole shareholder then appoints the person a board member, after which the Board appoints her President and Director. That last step was completed on 6 July 2026.

Article 3 requires a mandato-marco setting the broadcaster’s general objectives, approved by absolute majority in the first vote and simple majority thereafter, with at least 48 hours between votes. The Junta General approved RTPA’s mandato marco on 25 June 2025, with Vox the only group voting against; it was published in the Boletín Oficial del Principado de Asturias on 8 July 2025. Article 4 provides for three-year programme contracts agreed between the regional government and RTPA to implement it, and the parliamentary committee that produced the mandato marco stated that such a contract would set the economic amounts and programming percentages.

The Junta General maintains a permanent RTPA control committee. The Principality has no regional audiovisual authority; the only such bodies in Spain operate in Catalonia, the Valencian Community and Andalusia. RTPA falls within the remit of the Sindicatura de Cuentas del Principado de Asturias and separately contracts an external auditor, most recently for the 2025, 2026 and 2027 annual accounts.

Source of funding and budget

Law 8/2014 establishes mixed financing: an annual public compensation from the regional budget for delivering the public service, together with advertising, sales and other commercial income. The compensation may not exceed the net cost of the public service in any year, surpluses reduce later allocations, commercial prices may not be undercut using public money, and separate accounting by activity is required. The regional budget laws approve RTPA’s operating and capital budgets.

RTPA publishes its operating and capital budgets from 2015 onwards and its annual accounts, management reports and audit reports for every year from 2014 to 2025. An assessment published in May 2026 put RTPA’s annual funding at about EUR 30 million and EUR 31.50 per inhabitant, among the lowest of Spain’s regional broadcasters, and reported that the amount had changed little since 2011.

RTPA also finances independent production in advance. Its 2026 call, signed by the Director General, offered EUR 150,000 excluding VAT in two equal lines for fiction and non-fiction, capped at 49% of total production costs, with scoring criteria that include filming in Asturias, local crews and use of Asturian.

Editorial independence

The mandato marco requires objectivity, plurality and professional independence in news, respect for political pluralism and cultural and ideological diversity, promotion of Asturian and Eonaviego, a gender perspective in content, media literacy and action against disinformation.

Article 8 of Law 8/2014 states that the editing of news programmes shall in all cases be provided with the broadcaster’s own resources, without prejudice to the external contracting of services auxiliary to the production chain. The regional news bureaus are staffed under contract by Videoreport Asturias, part of the Mediapro group, which has provided the service since 2013 and won its third consecutive three-year award in January 2023. Forty-four of its workers staff the bureaus across Asturias and one in Madrid, and an April 2026 investigation reported that they supply between 80% and 90% of TPA Noticias content, the higher share at weekends. In February 2026 they protested over pay of about EUR 1,400 to 1,500 a month, the absence of a newsroom and uncompensated storage of equipment, and asked to be brought onto RTPA’s staff; the renewed contract carried a 17% budget increase. The deputy Covadonga Tomé asked for RTPA’s human resources director and acting director to appear before the Junta General. The workers’ account concerns pay and working conditions and does not allege editorial direction by the contractor. Cañedo’s programme for the broadcaster included reducing contractor posts in the news bureaus.

One contested programming decision is documented. In January 2025 the Board resolved to stop broadcasting the Day of Asturias mass at Covadonga in full and live, and to cover the religious ceremonies within regular news programming instead. Six members voted in favour, Hurlé Palacio abstained and San Román Noriega voted against. The Popular Party called the decision sectarian and linked it to the regional president’s absence from Covadonga. In September 2025 the member who proposed it said he had acted on his own initiative rather than on party instruction, citing the non-confessional character of the State; on 8 September 2025 RTPA covered the ceremonies without a live transmission of the mass.

Two statutory oversight bodies remain without publicly documented operation. Article 26 provides for a five-member Consejo de Informativos to safeguard the independence, veracity and objectivity of news content and to give a non-binding opinion on news management appointments, with its constitution and operating rules to be approved by the Board in agreement with RTPA’s professionals. Article 24 provides for an eleven-member Consejo de Comunicación appointed by the regional government on the proposal of the organisations represented in it, serving six-year terms and advising the Board on programming, access rights, advertising standards and audience complaints. RTPA’s transparency portal publishes no composition, rules, membership or reports for either body, and its structure page describes both only as the law provides for them. No public record of either body’s constitution or activity was located for this update.

AI and digital policy

Decree 98/2025 of 22 July regulates the use of artificial intelligence in the Administration of the Principality of Asturias and its public sector, which includes RTPA as a regional public company. It was published in the Boletín Oficial del Principado de Asturias of 31 July 2025 and entered into force on 31 October 2025. It sets principles of explicability, equity, transparency, traceability, respect for human autonomy and privacy; requires verification and monitoring in controlled test environments by interdisciplinary teams before deployment; assigns authorisation, supervision and control to the competent department working with the Digital Strategy and Information Security Committee; and aligns risk classification, transparency and registration duties with Regulation (EU) 2024/1689.

RTPA integrated an automated subtitling system across its on-demand content on 1 December 2025. Its website converts text to audio in real time using synthetic voices. An Asturias semanal report broadcast in May 2026 used recreation and animation techniques applied to period photographs; the published account names the RTPA staff who produced it and describes no editorial policy, human-supervision rule or on-air labelling for such material. The regional government said in July 2026 that it would approve an artificial-intelligence strategy over the summer, advised by a committee of government representatives, social partners and the University of Oviedo; the published account does not refer to public media.

No RTPA editorial policy for generative artificial intelligence in journalism was located. The sources checked were RTPA’s transparency portal and its corporate information, regulations and structure pages, its accessibility and milestones pages, its news archive and regional reporting.

Classification rationale

RTPA remains classified Independent State-Funded and State-Managed (ISFM).

The Principality owns the company and supplies the predominant share of its funding, and the Junta General elects both the Board and the Director General. Those appointment rules carry the absolute-majority fallback found across Spain’s regional broadcasters, and it determined the 2026 appointment: Cañedo was elected on the second round with 23 of 45 votes after the reinforced majority failed.

The 2026 process also shows the limits of governing-party control over the outcome. The Socialist Party’s preferred candidate was blocked by its own coalition partner and by cultural organisations and never reached a vote, and the appointment went to a candidate who had appeared before the parliamentary control committee.

No evidence of a sustained editorial line imposed or approved by state authorities was found for this update, which is the editorial criterion for State-Controlled status. The one contested programming decision was taken by Board vote with the opposition’s members dissenting, and the member who proposed it denied acting on party instruction.

September 2026